Alan Dickinson’s methods enabled researchers to track the progress of BSE from cattle to humans

The geneticist Alan Dickinson, who has died aged 87, was aware even as a young man that he might not live to answer the question that dominated his career: what causes mind-rotting diseases such as scrapie in sheep and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) in people? Such was the risk faced by a scientist who in the 1950s chose to specialise in a field then known as “slow viruses”.

As these disorders, joined in the 1980s by mad cow disease, were reclassified over the years as transmissible spongiform encephalopathies and, latterly, “prion” diseases, the research group that Dickinson founded in Edinburgh trod a unique path. Whereas rival labs elsewhere in the UK and abroad attempted to reduce diseased brains until all that was left was the pathogen, and then routinely failed, Dickinson preferred to study clinical symptoms and patterns of brain damage caused by scrapie in generations of specially inbred mice, then gradually deduce what kind of infectious agent might be causing it.

Supported by the Moredun Research Institute, the Animal Breeding Research Organisation, the Agricultural Research Council, the Medical Research Council and the American National Institutes of Health, in the late 1960s and throughout the 70s Dickinson, with his early collaborators George Outram and Hugh Fraser, began to publish a series of groundbreaking reports, many in the journal Nature. Among their findings: that a host gene affected susceptibility to disease and that scrapie came in distinct strains with clearly differentiated incubation times, clinical symptoms and patterns of brain damage.

Perhaps the most important and least appreciated of their discoveries was something called “blocking”. If introduced first into a test mouse, a slow-acting strain of scrapie could beat a fast one. This told Dickinson that a host offered only so many sites for the scrapie agent to perch on before it began blocking access to other strains.

The work was regarded as seminal by Dickinson’s peers, but greater glory proved elusive. In 1976 the US physician Daniel Gajdusek was awarded the Nobel prize for showing that a South Pacific variant of CJD could be transmitted by exposure to infected brain. Yet it was not Gajdusek who that year warned about the CJD danger posed by treating dwarfism in thousands of children in the US, Europe and Australia with human growth hormone rendered from cadaver brains. That was Dickinson, who later confirmed a safe purification protocol.

The compensation still going to families of more than 70 British hormone recipients who died from the treatments with inadequately purified hormone were backdated to the first clearly stated circulation of Dickinson’s warning.

Two decades later, in the heat of the mad cow crisis of the 1990s, a second Nobel in the field went to another American rival, the neurologist Stanley Prusiner of the University of California, San Francisco, who speculated that the scrapie agent was a novel infectious protein, which he named a “prion”. Prions, he suggested, were misfolded proteins that triggered cascading neurodegeneration without the help of a conventional pathogen, the “slow virus” of yore, which would require genetic programming in the form of a nucleic acid. The assertion flew headlong at the strain-typing work done by Dickinson’s group, and has yet to be conclusively validated.

By the time Prusiner’s Nobel was announced, Dickinson was gone from the lab that he had founded at Edinburgh University, a victim less of an ambitious American rival than of his own deeply ingrained traits.

Born to Isabella (nee Loynd) and Golborne Dickinson, mill owners, in Blackburn, Lancashire, just as India’s boycott and the Great Depression devastated the cotton industry, Dickinson grew up during an era of second world war austerity, and was given to taking resourcefulness to occasional extremes. Not long after completing an undergraduate degree at Liverpool University and a doctorate in genetics at Birmingham, he moved with his parents, his wife, Helen (nee Morris), whom he had married in 1953, and their children to Scotland, where farmers were funding scrapie work.

By way of lodgings, he found a rambling old house where, his daughter Jane recalled, “not all rooms had floorboards”. When the floor gave way in the family’s old Triumph Herald, Dickinson fixed it using a bucket. Family holidays were taken in a Bedford camper van.

Staff meetings at the lab, remembered Outram, were such egalitarian affairs that everyone from animal house workers to secretaries to scientists attended. “All had to hear what was going on,” he said. “Scientists every week had to spend some time cleaning animal cages so we appreciated what that was about.”

Running a lab like a Quaker meeting was only possible in the rank-conscious world of government science because Dickinson had scrambled for funds from steadily evolving research councils in ways that left his lab, the Neuropathogenesis Unit (NPU) at Edinburgh, more or less autonomous. However, when in 1987 the NPU was made an administrative satellite of the Institute for Animal Health at Compton, Berkshire, Dickinson quit. He was, at the end of his career, inherently allergic to being managed.

The departure left Fraser and a young pathologist, Moira Bruce, to strain-type a newly emerging cattle disease that would within a decade explode into an epidemic so catastrophic that it contributed to the downfall of the Tory government. Only Dickinson’s strain-typing method enabled researchers in the UK to track the progress of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) – also known as mad cow disease – from cattle to exotic zoo antelopes to a cat and, ultimately, to humans. Dickinson’s final public stand was a tireless barrage of pestering to force the young Labour government in 1997 to set up a public inquiry into the origins of mad cow disease. In this he was successful.

By 1999, concerned by his wife’s double diagnosis of multiple sclerosis and Parkinson’s disease, Dickinson moved from the house where he had filled in the missing flooring, painted the bathroom purple and lime green, and built a garden so beautiful that the horticulturist Christopher Lloyd came to call. The devout Congregationalist couple who had courted in morning prayers as undergraduates at Liverpool before joining Quaker meetings in Edinburgh captured another 13 years together before Helen died in 2012.

Dickinson is survived by their five children, Ruth, Karen, Jane, Stephen and John, and four grandchildren, Margaret, Lisa, Sam and Ross.

• Alan Dickinson, geneticist, born 30 March 1930; died 27 September 2017